Not shown: Firen the pyromancer & Henry the archer, and many other hidden characters.
Little Fighter 2 is a freeware Beat 'em Up created by Marti Wong and Starsky Wong and released in 1999, featuring Super-Deformed characters beating the crap out of each other. Quite fast-paced, supports a large number of fighters on the screen at the same time, and features surprisingly good enemy AI for such a simple-looking game.Little Fighter 2 has a large number of game modes, including a simple 1 v. 1, a "story" mode where you fight your way through multiple stages full of lesser enemies, and a tournament mode. The latest version 2.0a added music & a survival stage mode.
In 2021, Marti announced a remake of the game in Unity, planned for a Steam release in late 2022. However, development of the game went silent in early 2022, and the status of the project is unknown.
Little Fighter 2 provides examples of:
- Anime Hair: Some of the characters have very Dragon Ball Z-like hairstyles.
- Ambidextrous Sprite: In order to fix a bug where sprites aren't flipped properly, the latest version of the original game actually allows you to avert this trope.
- Beam-O-War: This can happen when two fighters rapid-fire ranged attacks at each other.
- Boss Game: If you consider the normal characters that pop-up in Stage Mode to be mid-bosses, then it slowly becomes one, until every other wave is a mid-boss wave with 4 mid-bosses.
- Classic Cheat Code:
- If you beat the game on Difficult, it informs you that typing lf2.net unlocks all characters. What it does not tell you is that the code also unlocks a Harder Than Hard difficulty ("CRAZY!") and that the low-HP requirements for Louis to become LouisEX and Firen and Freeze to fuse into Firzen are removed, allowing them to transform regardless of how much HP they have.
- Typing abc enables a debug mode where F3 can be used to encrypt/decrypt files.
- Typing herofighter.com enables the use of the F6-F9 functions in all game modes.
- Combos: One of the selling points of this beat'em up game, while still being balanced enough to be played competitively.
- Critical Status Buff: Characters' MP regenerates faster as they lose health, allowing characters to spam their specials when down to low HP.
- Defeat Means Friendship: In the story mode, some opponents (namely Bat and LouisEX in Chapter 5) join your team after you beat them.
- Destructible Projectiles: Almost all projectiles can be cancelled, although some stronger ones can require multiple shots from weaker ones. It's even possible for a group of enemies launching attacks along the same line to accidentally cancel each other's shots.
- Didn't Need Those Anyway!: Louis is the only armored default character and is the slowest of the lot, but if you execute the right key combination when he is on low health, he will discard his armor and pull out a cool-looking spear from it. In this form he is the fastest character in the game and gets a few powerful attacks involving his spear, but he also becomes unable to use some of his other moves, while his Phoenix Palm attack, which is originally fired in both directions, becomes spammable and more powerful, but is now only fired in one direction.
- Dynamic Difficulty: Along with the normal difficulty settings, having more players in Stage Mode means more enemies will spawn at a time, and using more powerful characters also increases the number of enemies spawned.
- Eye Beams: Bat's appropriately-named Eye Laser.
- Fixed-Floor Fighting: The games have a long stretch of land on one plane.
- Fusion Dance: Firen and Freeze can fuse to become Firzen once they are both down to a third of their HP.
- Game Mod: One of the reasons why this game has survived is due to it being easy to mod.
- Hailfire Peaks: Queen's Island, the stage with Firzen as the boss.
- Hazy-Feel Turn: Bat and LouisEX will join you if you beat them in stage 5, but due to game's complete lack of plot it's impossible to tell if they become good or bad guys (though probably the former due to their boss Julian being made to look as Obviously Evil as possible).
- Hidden Weapons: Some characters, notably Rudolf, automatically conceal any small weapon they're carrying.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Drinking milk heals injuries in a few seconds.
- An Ice Person: Freeze uses exclusively ice attacks. He is also the only character in the game who can turn energy blasts into deflected ice blasts without the use of an ice sword (which, incidentally, are only spawned by one of Freeze's moves).
- Immune to Flinching: Characters with armor class above 0 will need to be hurt for that amount before they flinch. Louis can take one hit, while Knight and Julian can take two hits before flinching. Unique to Julian is that he is also able to shrug off two fire- and ice- hits without having to block them; these types bypass the armor class on Louis and Knight.
- Ki Manipulation: Most of the characters can channel MP into various types of ranged projectiles. Exceptions are Rudolf (his projectiles are shuriken), Bandit, Hunternote , Mark, Knight and Template.
- Multishot: Henry and Rudolf can do this with arrows and shurikens respectively.
- No Plot? No Problem!: Characters have no official backstories whatsoever. Why are they beating up the mooks or Julian and why are they coming across tied up guys in blue is anyone's guess.
- Palette Swap: Generic units in Stage and Battle mode have two different color schemes to distinguish between friendly and enemy versions of them.
- Red Mage: Sorcerers can use fire, ice and healing magic.
- Respawning Enemies: In Stage Mode, if there are any mid-bosses (basically normal enemy non-mook characters) or bosses on the field, the mooks will respawn endlessly until they're taken out. Yes, this includes healers, too.
- Playing with Fire: Firen, as you might expect from his name, uses fire in his special moves. They can set enemies on fire, which prevents them from recovering in mid-air and also ignites other enemies they crash into.
- Punched Across the Room: Louis and LouisEX's Thunder Punch, Mark's Crash Punch and Julian's Soul Punch are running attacks that deliver tremendous damage and send any enemy struck by them flying backwards a considerable distance.
- Self-Duplication: Rudolf gets this. The copies are computer-controlled and can be killed by a stiff breeze.
- Shotoclone: Davis and Dennis are basically Ryu with his abilities divided between two different characters. Davis gets a Shoryuken with his Dragon Punch and Dennis has a Hurricane Kick move.
- Shout-Out: Mainly to Dragon Ball, with the following examples being the most prominent:
- Woody's hairstyle greatly resembles Goku when he is in Super Saiyan form.
- John can hurl Energy Disks that home in on enemies, much like Frieza and his Death Saucers.
- When firing the Firzen Cannon, Firzen's pose is exactly the same as Vegeta's when the latter is using his Final Flash.
- Julian's pose when firing off a Soul Bomb is exactly the same as the standard pose for firing a Kamehameha.
- Smurfette Principle: Jan is the only female character in the game.
- SNK Boss: The bosses of the last 2 chapters in Story Mode:
- Julian, who has a powerful basic attack, an armor that lets him get hit twice before taking any real damage, an easily spammable attack that fires multiple skull like projectiles with minor tracking ability, a powerful and large projectile that can overpower multiple weaker projectiles and a move that's basically an explosion of energy around him. All of those moves have a very low cost compared to their damage output, and he can very easily overwhelm opponents with projectile spam and combo enemies to death from full health (the AI will, thankfully, not do the latter). Oh, and on top of that he's pretty fast.
- Firzen, who's one of the fastest characters in the game, has a shield that can reflect projectiles, a move that fires a powerful beam of energy, a move that fires at least 4 (depending on the number of opponents) homing fireballs and ice balls into the air which can knock you into each other as they land (and if it happens when he spams it, you're dead) and a move that's that plus an explosion of fire and ice around him, which is a potential One-Hit KO if you're next to him (and the ice balls can freeze you, so he can easily move next to you and use it).
- Both of the above also cannot be selected at the character select screen without a cheat codenote , and when encountered as bosses have many thousands of HP (for reference, the player's starting health is 500).
- Spiteful A.I.: AI enemies put a surprisingly high priority on grabbing items (especially milk bottles) so that you can't use them. That being said, they don't take into account other enemies going after the same item, which causes it to border on Artificial Stupidity at times when multiple enemies dogpile on the same item, lining up a perfect attack for the player.
- Standard Bleeding Spots: After a character has been damaged enough their sprite shows blood dripping from the corner of their mouth.
- Super-Deformed: All of the characters are this.
- Teleport Spam: Woody can do this, to some extent. His teleportation is slow and predictable, but he can activate a "tiger dash" almost instantly afterwards, so teleporting right up to the opponent and doing a tiger dash is somewhat viable.
- Yin-Yang Bomb: Firen and Freeze can combine into Firzen, the second most powerful character in the game with devastating attacks combining fire and ice.
- The War Sequence: The sheer number of Mooks showing up at the same time in Stage Modenote or Battle Mode can invoke this. Fortunately, you can recruit Mooks of your own to make the numbers more even.
